HarperCollins

Two months had elapsed since she went to the Police Department’s Economic Crime Unit.

When you’re born, you’re a baby. That’s something we can all agree on. But you’re not just a baby. No.

You’re a story.

A beautiful, bouncing, gurgling story.

A tale to be treasured.

her bloodline spooled around her as she wove her case.

It was hard to hear that they might be too few and too

late.

In all times and all cultures and during every phase of life—among them the birth of a child or grandchild and confrontations with death and other serious crises—these essential questions are asked again and again. You may have asked them yourself. Yet we seldom receive satisfactory answers. Whatever happens in our lives—whether we meet with success or disappointment, no matter how much fame, power, or wealth we acquire—death is inescapable.

he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill and—hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot—examined the nature and purport of the feeling.
It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion—no, more, an hallucination. His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw.

Loneliness, the foreign environment, and the joy of a belated and profound exhilaration prompted him, persuaded him to indulge without shame or remorse in the most distasteful behavior, as when returning from Venice late one evening he had paused at the beautiful boy’s door on the second floor of the hotel and pressed his forehead against the hinge in drunken rapture, unable to tear himself away even at the risk of being discovered and caught.

That night he had a terrifying dream—if dream be the word for the physical and mental experience which did indeed befall him with a life of its own and a sensuous immediacy while he was in a deep sleep, yet in which he did not see himself present, moving through space, external to the events, its scene being rather his very soul, and the events breaking in from without, violently crushing his resistance, a deep, spiritual resistance, and, having run their course, leaving his entire being, the culture of a lifetime, devasted, obliterated.

“I’ve got the backbone of a worm,” Lacey Lancaster muttered as she let herself into her apartment. She tossed her mail onto an end table and glared at Cleo. “I didn’t say a word to Mr. Sullivan, not a single word.”

Cleo, her Abyssinian cat, affectionately wove her golden-brown body between Lacey’s ankles. Her long tail coiled around Lacey’s calf like a feather boa, soft, sleek, and soothing.

“I had the perfect opportunity to ask for a raise and did I do it?” Lacey demanded, kicking her feet so that her shoes sailed in opposite directions. “Oh, no, I let it pass by. And do you know why?”

Cleo apparently didn’t. Lacey took off her bright green vinyl raincoat, opened the closet door, and shoved it inside. “Because I’m a coward, that’s why.”

Walking into the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside, rooting out som

Cleo apparently didn’t. Lacey took off her bright green vinyl raincoat, opened the closet door, and shoved it inside. “Because I’m a coward, that’s why.”

Walking into the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator and stuc